"With Au Jus"

Is this reaction of mine to "with au jus" actually an overreaction? Or, worse yet, am I (gulp) wrong in thinking the phrase is wrong?

"Au jus" itself means "with juice," but most English speakers don't know this. "The hoi polloi" is also redundant, but nobody seems to object to that.

Transpose hotmail and mxsmanic in my e-mail address to reach me directly.

How common is the phrase (in English) "with au jus"? Each time I encounter it (on menus or in conversation ... jus" is in a Quiznos commercial on TV. Is this reaction of mine to "with au jus" actually an overreaction?

Nope.

Or, worse yet, am I (gulp) wrong in thinking the phrase is wrong?

It's always struck me as so laughable it's beyond comment. I first met it in the late 1970s in Edmonton, Alberta, in a fancy hotel coffee shop which described its (not-underpriced) beef sandwich as being "served with a steaming bowl of au jus".
In my view it hasn't got any less laughably dumb over the past 25 years...

Cheers, Harvey
Ottawa/Toronto/Edmonton for 30 years;
Southern England for the past 22 years.
(for e-mail, change harvey.news to harvey.van)

How common is the phrase (in English) "with au jus"? Each time I encounter it (on menus or in conversation ... au jus" actually an overreaction? Or, worse yet, am I (gulp) wrong in thinking the phrase is wrong? Maria Conlon

It's common enough in restaurants , it strikes me as awkward too. I'm always reminded of a cartoon showing a waiter holding a cooked phone book and saying"We gave it a fancy French name and you ordered it".

How common is the phrase (in English) "with au jus"? Each time I encounter it (on menus or in conversation ... to "with au jus" actually an overreaction? Or, worse yet, am I (gulp) wrong in thinking the phrase is wrong?

This kind of redundancy is common. We do it with initialisms all the time:
ATM machine
HIV virus
PIN number

dg (domain=ccwebster)

How common is the phrase (in English) "with au jus"? ... am I (gulp) wrong in thinking the phrase is wrong?

This kind of redundancy is common. We do it with initialisms all the time: ATM machine HIV virus PIN number

"What you mean 'we', white man?"
Best regards,
Spehro Pefhany

"it's the network..." "The Journey is the reward" (Email Removed) Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com Embedded software/hardware/analog Info for designers: http://www.speff.com

How common is the phrase (in English) "with au jus"? ... am I (gulp) wrong in thinking the phrase is wrong?

This kind of redundancy is common. We do it with initialisms all the time: ATM machine HIV virus PIN number

With respect, m'lud, that's avoiding the question. The issue is whether such redundancy is objectionable not whether it's common.

(For what it's worth, I find all of your examples annoyingly objectionable. They're common, but they've not yet at least in my books reached acceptability.)

Cheers, Harvey
Ottawa/Toronto/Edmonton for 30 years;
Southern England for the past 22 years.
(for e-mail, change harvey.news to harvey.van)

"What you mean 'we', white man?"

I said "we do it ...", not "we all do it ...". That lets you off the hook, Spehro.

dg (domain=ccwebster)
All generalizations are false.

On 26 Sep 2004, don groves wrote

(!!)

With respect, m'lud, that's avoiding the question. The issue is whether such redundancy is objectionable not whether it's common. ... of your examples annoyingly objectionable. They're common, but they've not yet at least in my books reached acceptability.)

So you say 'PIN' without 'number' and someone thinks you are talking about a pin. In parts of the US where they merge the pin/pen sounds, people expand those words to disambiguate them. That doesn't explain 'ATM machine' and 'HIV virus', but perhaps the speaker's feel for the language telling him that he needs to classify what the acronym is does.

Russian has the word 'businessmen' and for women has 'businessmenka'. The word in English, 'men', isn't registering as its English meaning and has united to form a single meaning. I've heard it argued that this has partly happened in English with such words as 'chairman', 'congressman' and the like. Or at least it was trying to happen until the feminists came along and insisted that we needed different words for everything that didn't include the offensive 'man' or 'men'.
Obviously "au jus" is opaque to many speakers of English, just as one would expect. It's meaning has become, in English, not the literal French word meaning but a food product, a type of juice used for dipping. If we look at the word 'salsa' in Spanish, there's probably another example of this broadening or narrowing of meaning as it moves to English.
A good current example would be when one needs to say something like "The al Qaeda organization". Should we insist that the Arabic definite article do its duty in English too? Should we drop the Arabic definite article when we add the English indefinite article? Is this silly to worry about? It's not any more silly than freaking about "with au jus".